Product Description

Dirty Havana Trilogy was hugely acclaimed for its honest depiction of a Cuban capital characterised by sleaze, sex, poverty and hedonism. In The Insatiable Spiderman we see the return of its anti-hero, who is again prowling the streets of Havana. Pedro Juan's relationship with his wife is in terminal decline. He can no longer face kissing her on the mouth and the trappings of domestic bliss hold no charms for this most restless and predatory of men. Our narrator's interests lie elsewhere: in the infinite possibilities of a chaotic Caribbean city and the many chancers, artists and prostitutes who roam the streets in search of fresh experience. In his inimitably uncompromising and exhilarating style, Pedro Juan Gutierrez again takes the reader on a journey into the underbelly of contemporary Havana - a world of easy sex, hard drinking and humorous anecdote that will be all too recognisable to the Gutierrez connoisseur.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2465698 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 163 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Cuban writer Gutiérrez has mined and loosely fictionalized his own life in creating Pedro Juan, a Havana writer, in two previous collections of linked vignettes, Dirty Havana Trilogy (2000) and Tropical Animal (2003). This book offers more of the same, and the formula, like the line outside of a poorly stocked Havana fish store, is wearying. Pedro Juan's adventures with various women feature a kind of modulated macho: he's not particularly interested in any of them other than physically, especially wife Julia, but he's very good at articulating his boredom and their various flaws. His travels around Cuba and his liaisons, however, continue to reveal slices of Cuban life. This time we meet a washed-up boxer touchingly devoted to his philandering wife; Pedro Juan's superstitious mother, who lives across town; an old woman who sells useless books out of her home; various lovers from various times in his life, who call or whom he runs into on the street; and many others. Heat, listlessness and varying degrees of lust are constants, and Pedro Juan's vague frustrations, this time out, become the reader's. (Feb. 27)
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From Booklist
Gutierrez's Dirty Havana Trilogy (2000) was a debauchery-drenched picaresque narrative with political overtones, and its follow-up, Tropical Animal (2003), revealed its loosely autobiographical protagonist Pedro Juan's inability to extract his lust from his native Cuba. Gutierrez's latest again finds Pedro Juan chafing against constraints on his sex-fuelled aesthetic of freedom, but this time it is not poverty and political oppression but the familiar inertia of middle age that threatens to sap his creative energy. Pedro Juan's appetites for liquor and lasciviousness have not waned, but his sexual interludes are fewer and further between, and the women he pursues are less available; anxiety permeates as it did not before. He tolerates arguments with his stolid wife, visits with his superstitious elderly mother, and the corruption of local officials with a new complacency. Like most midlife crises, such changes can be awkward to witness, as a few clumsy Hemingway references in this selection demonstrate. But this novel also exudes a fresh honesty and hints that Gutierrez may be trying to find new literary horizons. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"'Shows the heart of Cuba with total honesty... full of passion.' Time Out"

Customer Reviews

Misses the Cult Status Tag

'Destined to be a cult writer' says the TLS,but 'The Insatiable Spiderman' misses the bus.
Yes, it tells of the seedier side of life in Cuba, but this is mostly Gutierrez talking of his sexual conquests and desires. And like hearing anyone go on and on about their sex life-unless you're an adolescent virgin-it soon becomes tiresome and boring.
Burroughs wrote about drugs,Algren of Division Street Chicago,Wright of Black Chicago and Kerrouac of free living. All cult writers as they took you into their world and made you see things from a different perspective.
Gutierrez fails to deliver.The causes of grinding poverty,life under Castro,pathos for the people he writes of hardly exist.
A big dissapointment.